


Kryptic Courtship

by TheSpaceCoyote



Category: Homestuck
Genre: M/M, boys dealing with feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-22
Updated: 2013-01-22
Packaged: 2017-11-26 10:08:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/649443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSpaceCoyote/pseuds/TheSpaceCoyote
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This Dirk is Dirk, not a bleeding mind splinter nor a robot nor a conniving A.I. It's the real Dirk Strider, and the novelty of that has still left you reeling in surprise. Maybe you still don't actually believe it, maybe you think that maybe this is just red herring crossing your path and leading you down the wrong rabbit hole again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kryptic Courtship

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a friend for her birthday on Tumblr. u-u

You and Dirk had been battling those confounded skull creature in the bowels in one of them towering skyscraper tombs. It had been quite the, err-- _destructive_  fight. The two of you had blasted away the skeletal inhabitants of Dirk's planet perhaps a little  _too_ hard, and one too many had perhaps crashed through the walls of the catacombs, because the entire thing had started shaking up a storm and prompting the two of you to flee the scene on Dirk's rocket board. You had clutched onto Dirk the entire way as he wove through the steadily collapsing tower and into the poison air, tearing through it to a distant vantage point on one of the opposite tombs. 

The two of you are exhausted, breaths heaving as you sit on the edge of blown-out room. You imagine that at one point a pane of glass may have protected the interior room from the outside, but now there is nothing between solid ground and free-falling hundreds of stories down. Not that any of the entombed inhabitants would have been in danger of accidentally walking off the edge, considering they were well, dead. For the most part. Though you wouldn't be complaining if some of those consarned skeletons took a tumble.

The two of you are now seated cross-legged near the edge of the building's drop-off, with an ample cushion of space between you. In the thick of battle neither of you are afraid of coming into close quarters and even  _touching_  one another, but once the distracting adrenaline of survival fades you settle back into the norm, with personal bubbles of steel between the two of you.

It's been this way since the two of you first entered the Medium and paired off. You never really thought of either yourself or Dirk as shy but the two of you are certainly acting like a pair of coy maidens with all these dodging looks and stiff conversation.

You're rather peeved at yourself to say the least, because for the first time you have the actual Dirk in front of you and yet you're nothing but awkward and nervous around him. This Dirk  _is_  Dirk, not a bleeding mind splinter nor a robot nor a conniving A.I. It's the real Dirk Strider, and the novelty of that has still left you reeling in surprise. Maybe you still don't actually believe it, maybe you think that maybe this is just red herring crossing your path and leading you down the wrong rabbit hole  _again._

Because of this, the gas mask he wears makes you a little paranoid, due to the fact that it looks so damn alien. Now usually you're pretty down with aliens, with the strange and the weird and the foreign, but when it comes to Dirk you are so tired of the inorganic. You want to see his face, want to touch the soft warmth of his skin instead of the cold titanium or fiberglass or wispy dreamflesh. 

The distant rumbling of the tombs across the way slowly losing their upright support fades into white noise as you look sidelong at Dirk. 

You can't see his eyes because of the blasted mask, but he is facing forward, and unless he's eyeing you much in the same way that you're eyeing him you're sure he can't be looking at you. Then again, Dirk always seems to have eyes dotted all over his head and a sharp point of a sixth sense. 

You shift a bit, clearing your throat.

You keep waiting for Dirk to breach the awkward barrier between the two of you, but he has made nary an effort to do so as of yet. 

You don't know why you've been kidding yourself that he'll be the first one to take the plunge, because blimey, you know Dirk's would never to be the one to initiate physical contact. You may have a thick skull but you aren't entirely blind to the complex machinations of your friend's brain. You're tired of waiting and if you want to turn the situation on its head you're going to have to force his hand-- _literally_ \-- to cure the uncomfortable standoffishness between you. 

So you swallow your misgivings and reach over to gently curl your hand over Dirk's pointer finger. It's a nervous touch, and you don't know how he will react. He doesn't immediately pull away from you, so you suppose that's a good sign, but--you were far prefer some form of negative response to the stillness he exhibits. You want to glance over and check his face for clues but you remember the gas masks. Not that you have enough mettle to look at his face even if he  _weren't_  wearing it. 

You're about to retract your hand and write this off as a wistful folly but then he swipes his thumb over your forefinger and the movement is so quick you're not sure if it was an accidental twitch or no. But that whisper thin touch soon resolves into a light grip, and like that the two of you are holding hands. You feel his warmth pulse through into your own, traveling up your arm and making your heart beat in time. 

A tremor and a loud rumble cause you to start and turn your head--the tower tomb is finally collapsing, its scaffold crumbling and taking with it all the undisturbed remains of Dirk's deceased consorts. You watch, enraptured for a moment as it folds in on itself, stone like paper as it ripples downward and into the earth. 

Dirk squeezes your hand tight, prompting you to look away from the collapse and back at Dirk. This time his mask is tilted towards you and you can only assume that he's looking at you. Since you still can't really see his eyes. 

But he fixes that a mere moment later when he removes the mask from his face and tilts it up to rest on the crown on his head. 

You jerk to stop him, to pull the mask back on because what in the  _blazes_  is he doing, but he stills your hand. His lips are pursed and his cheeks steadily filling up with spent air. 

He leans in, prompting you to do the same, only remembering to tilt up your own mask at the last moment when you realize that he's  _really_  going for it and he's not just going to stop--

And your lips meet, and he pushes his air into your lungs as your own exhales back against his tongue and teeth and throat. 

The concentration of krypton gas in the air prevents you from surviving all that long without some form of respiratory protection, but in that one moment, Dirk is enough protection for you. The fold of your lips joining together is enough of a safety net, and the warmth of his lips and the sharing of old breath almost make you believe that you'll never need anything else to feel secure. 

The collapsing building induces the fall of a adjacent tombscraper and all around electricity snaps into a synaptic lightshow but despite these distractions all of your world is snared up in Dirk and the lifeline of mutual air passes between you. 

The dust of the collapsed tombs rises like a plume of smoke off into the distance, mirroring the ever present mushroom cloud trailing up over the horizon. 

Eventually the two of you part, out of necessity for new air more than anything else, but this time when Dirk pulls on his mask the unease at the oddity of the mask is  a bit abated. You've been reminded of what is behind it. No robot nor computer nor alien, only warm lips and a comforting camaraderie.  

He's still close enough that you can see his eyes through the darkened slats of the mask, and browned as they may appear through the protective plastic you know just how vibrant those eyes are underneath. 

The domino of collapsing towers continues all around you but Dirk moves to hold you and the entire world could be falling to its stony knees and you wouldn't care. 


End file.
